{"slug": "how-chronicle-media-helped-earthborne-games-triple-its-kickstarter-funding-by", "title": "How Chronicle Media helped Earthborne Games triple its Kickstarter funding by pinpointing its target audience", "summary": "Chronicle Media's AI audience discovery platform helped Earthborne Games' Kickstarter campaign for 'Earthborne Trailblazer' raise $550,000, more than triple its $150,000 goal, and generated over 1.5 million YouTube views with a 77% audience retention rate. The campaign attracted at least 4,000 unique Kickstarter backers and delivered a 1.44 times return on ad spend, according to Chronicle CEO Aaron Sisto.", "body_md": "*Become a member of GB MAX to gain exclusive access to the industry and to the most influential global B2B leadership community in the business of gaming, entertainment, and tech.*\n\n[Join now](https://go.gamesbeat.com/gb-max/)and also get a VIP ticket to GamesBeat Next (Nov 2-3, SF).[Chronicle Media](https://www.chronicle.ai) announced today that its audience simulation and acquisition platform helped support Earthborne Games’ Kickstarter campaign for “Earthborne Trailblazer,” which raised $550,000 – more than triple its goal — to launch the new tabletop game and fund an animated series pilot set in the Earthborne.\n\nEarthborne Games engaged Chronicle to expand the audience for its acclaimed cooperative, open-world adventure game “Earthborne Trailblazer.” Chronicle deployed a three-week YouTube campaign powered by its AI audience discovery platform.\n\nThis tool was fascinating to me, as described by CEO Aaron Sisto of Chronicle Media. Chronicle Media focuses on audience discovery and user acquisition in the gaming industry. Chronicle’s platform uses AI to predict audience demand and conversion rates, efficiently acquiring new fans for games and other media. Sisto highlighted his team’s success with Earthborne Games, achieving the most efficient YouTube campaign ever, and their ability to identify and target niche audiences. The platform also supports Made for Kids content, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations.\n\nSisto said Chronicle Media pinpointed high-value audience segments – animation fans and tabletop gamers among them — optimizing Earthborne’s social creative for engagement, and converting that reach into channel engagement. Some of those fans even converted to Kickstarter pledges showing the speed of the new viewers becoming the project’s core fans.\n\nThe $550,000 raised on Kickstarter outpaced its goal of $150,000 by 366%. Chronicle’s\n\ncampaign generated more than 1.5 million views of the animated Earthborne series preview on YouTube, with a 77% audience retention rate, well above the organic audience retention, helping drive subscriber growth and organic uplift.\n\nOn top of the primary goal of expanding the YouTube channel fanbase, Chronicle’s automated campaigns attracted at least 4,000 unique Kickstarter backers, and delivered above 1.44 times return on ad spend across the entire campaign.\n\nThe Kickstarter campaign overall was extremely successful because the Studio mobilized a strong existing fanbase while bringing new fans to the game via a 360 social strategy, including Meta, YouTube and other platforms.\n\n“This campaign is a compelling illustration of the power of Chronicle’s AI audience simulation capabilities,” said Aaron Sisto, CEO of Chronicle Media. “Earthborne already enjoys a passionate and dedicated fanbase. Our mandate was to build on that foundation by introducing the franchise to new audiences we knew would be drawn to its richly imagined world. We’re proud to have helped position Earthborne for its next phase of growth as the franchise expands into ‘Earthborne Trailblazer’ and new forms of storytelling.”\n\nFounded in 2020, Earthborne Games focuses on sustainably-produced tabletop games,\n\nincluding responsible sourcing, reduced plastic use and environmentally conscious\n\nmanufacturing practices. The Earthborne setting places players on a far future Earth, saved from The Great Calamities through the hard work of humankind. The geography of the Earth and biology of its creatures has changed drastically. This new world is covered in wildly diverse flora and fauna, much of it untouched by human hands for more than a thousand years. Only time will tell what mysteries will be uncovered by its inhabitants.\n\n“Earthborne Trailblazer” is a standalone game that expands the Earthborne universe, inviting one to five players to explore, strategize and survive together in a richly imagined far-future wilderness. It follows Earthborne’s flagship game, “Earthborne Rangers,” which was also launched with support from a Kickstarter campaign.\n\nChronicle Media powers the world’s top studios, brands, creators, and network partners to find and acquire new audiences on YouTube and social media. The company’s frontier audience simulation models predict how audiences will engage across tens of thousands of niche segments, finding the largest possible fanbase for any given brand or content.\n\nThe AI platform automates highly efficient campaigns spanning audience acquisition, brand awareness, channel growth, and demand forecasting, all supported by end-to-end ROAS analytics.\n\nFounded in 2025, Chronicle is backed by Patron, Point72 Ventures, Z Ventures, Sands Capital, and other leading investors. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Los Angeles, New York, and London.\n\n## The user acquisition problem\n\nSisto said the problems about discovery and the difficulty of building audiences is plaguing a variety of industries, particularly as privacy laws prevent precise targeting by advertisers.\n\n“This was our first big proof point in games, and now I can tie that into the broader context of what we’re doing in games more broadly,” Sisto said. “I can give you the high level of why we built this platform.”\n\nAbout 18 months ago, the team saw the core fan base is now growing and and emerging out of social. YouTube and all the social platforms are really where the audience has aggregated, and that is bringing every single brand and creator to the table, because that’s where discovery happens, he said.\n\n“Organic discovery created this incredible funnel that is very hard to actually manage and do successfully,” he said. “We’ve heard over and over from big Hollywood studios, like game studios, that discovery is impossible. Like it’s almost impossible to get a new game or new IP or even existing IP discovered and grow a fan base.”\n\nAnd so the company launched a platform as a frontier AI model to focus on taking emerging IP, existing IP, predicting audience demand across these platforms all the way down to the niche level, and then through that, be able to very efficiently acquire new fans, he said.\n\n“For a game studio, especially an indie studio, the question is how do you build out your Steam wishlist on a very small budget, without a huge social presence?” Sisto said.\n\n## The AI solution\n\nThe company has a solution. It will take a game trailer, drop it in the AI model, and find the audience for that trailer on YouTube, Sisto said.\n\n“We find your full audience on YouTube and tell you exactly who they are, where they are, how they watch, and then we use that to go and acquire them, bring them directly to Steam,” Sisto said. “And this all works because we’ve built our own frontier models based on real audience data, so we know how any certain piece of content will land and resonate with very niche segments.”\n\nThis is a different, predictive and bottoms-up approach to user acquisition, he said.\n\n“That’s what we proved with Earthborne,” he said. “And that’s why we’re so excited about announcing it. They said this is the most efficient, most successful YouTube campaign they have ever seen.”\n\nThis struck me as interesting because it’s hard to figure out who the humans are and who the bots are on YouTube now.\n\n“It’s actually a really good point because I think a lot of people get sold on campaigns and just drive up their viewer count. And what people find is you can’t convert bots; you can’t convert viewers that aren’t actually engaged with content,” he said. “And so, what our platform is able to do is it predicts the full funnel.”\n\nThat means it predicts who’s going to click and watch, but also who’s going to retain and watch the full trailer.\n\n“Who’s going to click to your channel, subscribe?” Sisto said. “Ultimately, who’s going to convert and go sign up for the wishlist or go download the app? That’s why we’re so effective. We’re actually predicting conversion rates and not just these empty bot teams.”\n\n## Origins\n\nChronicle Media started at the start of 2025 and raised funding quickly from Point72 Patron, a consumer venture capital firm run by Brian Cho and Jason Yeh.\n\nChronicle Media assemble AI engineers and researchers with veterans from media. Sisto’s cofounder is Scott Greenberg a veteran animation executive and producer best known for cofounding Bento Box Entertainment — the studio behind *Bob’s Burgers*. The show succeeded because Greenberg could show there was a fan base on social.\n\nThe team got excited when it could predict audience demand and then efficiently acquire new audiences.\n\n“We immediately broadened our scope to working with everyone who needs to use YouTube and social as top of funnel for acquisition,” Sisto said.\n\nBut they chose to start with gaming. In a demo, Sisto showed how they’re constantly automating ad infrastructure and running tests. Those tests delve into very niche audience segments down to an individual channel.\n\n“We know there’s an audience segment watching this particular anime show. At this certain time, we’re testing out a piece of content like a trailer against that audience, and we’re actually able to collect data on how they interact, right?” Sisto said. “And that is how we train the model. It’s all paid. This is all publicly available. But we had to automate the infrastructure to do this at scale, and so that’s a little bit of our secret sauce that we don’t really talk about publicly because ultimately we don’t think anyone else has collected this data.”\n\nThen the company works with brands who want to understand who their audiences are at a deep level.\n\n“We’ll go work with a children’s toy brand to really map out what the audience demand looks like across these different platforms, and how efficiently can they acquire them,” he said. “And in that case, we build custom models for them that basically allow them to test on their audience. So they can test product concepts, they can test trailers, right? They can optimize their creative before they even launch a single campaign, and that’s really the secret sauce because we can predict how audiences will engage.”\n\nThis works on YouTube and now the company is branching out to TikTok and Meta.\n\n“For a new partner, all they have to do is drop in some of their content. So this is an example of one that we ran just for fun. It’s a public video. But basically, what we do is we say, ‘Well, what’s when is the audience for Dungeons and Dragons, right?’ And basically, what as a user you can tell it, “Well, I actually really want to understand our audience in Europe or China, or the U.S. So you can define segments that you care about that you want to go analyze, but without saying anything more, saying I have no idea, please just tell me.”\n\nHe said the system runs a live simulation. It collects data and concludes this your core fan base.\n\n“Here are people that are core fans of this IP or franchise, but also here’s the total fan base, including segments that aren’t actively fans or aren’t actively watching your content. And all of these fans together, the entire TAM is reachable, so we can identify, we can reach them, and then ultimately we can help bring them to your channel or your Steam,” he said.\n\nHe said media companies can test content with these audiences in a closed loop to understand how to improve, how to optimize, and then Chronicle Media can also directly launch campaigns.\n\n“It’s a full end-to-end solution for acquisition. You define your goal, and the entire promotional campaign management is automated, and it’s all based on this audience intelligence that we’re able to deliver,” Sisto said. “You sit back and watch, and basically your entire acquisition funnel is automated and optimized to be very, very efficient.”\n\nThe company has worked with filmmakers and film studios to test trailers. It works with celebrity podcasts that are YouTube-centric. It works with music and games customers and microdrama apps. Sisto said in some cases, revenue increases 700%.\n\nSisto said that people will respond to ads for content that they like and then they can go directly to a channel associated with that content and explore it.\n\n“One of the ways we know this is working is the quality of the audience is very high. So usually, when you run an ad, very few people click. Even fewer people will watch, and then almost no one comes to the channel and subscribes,” Sisto said. “Ads today are so misplaced and they don’t target the right audiences. Our ads in this case actually had higher retention, which means people watched longer and were more engaged than any of the organic traffic, which is unheard of.”\n\nHe added, “People watched our ads on average 70% of the way through, which is insane if you think about that. Unless you’re putting something in front of someone who is already primed to be a fan, super fan, they’re gonna immediately swipe away. But people watched the entire thing, came to the channel and subscribed, and then went to the Kickstarter, and so it’s undeniable then that you’re actually targeting the right people.”\n\nHe said other marketers will try to use comps to go and justify a new IP or a new movie.\n\n“What our model does is it gets one level deeper into why that segment actually likes this content, and why is that content interest translating over? And so we call it affinity, and affinity is a more abstract way of understanding this segment,” he said. “Everything about them actually will carry over to create high affinity for this new trailer or content.”\n\nThe team has trained an AI model on this data to be able to predict demand and conversion, Sisto said. The company doesn’t generate AI content or rip off someone’s IP.\n\n“What our AI does is it discovers audiences and acquires them. So it’s a total predictive simulation model that actually can go and figure out who should I be targeting and how should I bring them back to my destination,” Sisto said. “So it’s a marketing and distribution problem, which AI is actually you nailed it. AI is perfect for it.”\n\nCreative teams that run the simulations can then create the ads needed to reach the right people.\n\n“We don’t produce the original content. We plug into teams that do that,” he said.\n\nThe company has about 15 to 20 people, and it has raised around $12 million to date.\n\nRyan Ward, an adviser for Chronicle Media, said he was looking for the tech and solution that Chronic Media came up with.\n\n“This is a solution to the suffering we’ve been feeling in the game industry,” Ward said.\n\nI think the interesting thing here is Chronicle Media is bringing back the ability to target audiences — something that everyone thought they lost for good when Apple cracked down on privacy violations. Only this time, there isn’t a privacy violation.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-chronicle-media-helped-earthborne-games-triple-its-kickstarter-funding-by", "canonical_source": "https://gamesbeat.com/how-chronicle-media-helped-earthborne-games-triple-its-kickstarter-funding-by-pinpointing-its-target-audience/", "published_at": "2026-08-21 13:15:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-21 16:42:35.000639+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-tools", "ai-products"], "entities": ["Chronicle Media", "Earthborne Games", "Earthborne Trailblazer", "Aaron Sisto", "Kickstarter", "YouTube"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-chronicle-media-helped-earthborne-games-triple-its-kickstarter-funding-by", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-chronicle-media-helped-earthborne-games-triple-its-kickstarter-funding-by.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-chronicle-media-helped-earthborne-games-triple-its-kickstarter-funding-by.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-chronicle-media-helped-earthborne-games-triple-its-kickstarter-funding-by.jsonld"}}